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Fido & Me — Storytime at Mammoth Rocks

The stranger walked over to Fido, who was blissfully sitting under a table at last weekend’s “Mammoth Rocks/A Taste of the Sierra” festival in the Village. He was manning the booth for the paper.

“Are you the dog in the paper all the time?” she said.

“That’s me!” Fido said, and he wagged his stump.

“Want to hear a story?” Fido said to the woman.

“Why, yes, Fido,” she responded. “I love stories.”

Fido wormed his way from beneath the table—not an easy thing to do for a big, red, 80-pound chow mix.

“Before I tell my story, may I just take a moment to say you are a very attractive human female?” Fido said.
“Thank you, Fido. You really know how to win a girl! So what’s the story?”

Fido sat on his haunches and began his tale.

“So there’s this guy, driving a convertible around Mammoth, and he sees a fellow sitting on his porch, playing checkers with his dog,” Fido began.

“Yes?” the woman said.

“The guy in the car stops and approaches the man and his dog and says, ‘That must be a pretty smart dog.’”

“‘Naw,’ says the man on the porch. ‘He ain’t THAT smart. I can beat him two out of three.’”

The woman paused for a moment, got the joke and just howled. Doubled-over, belly-laughing, knee-slapping, guffawing—laughter from way down, deep inside.

“Oh, you loveable THING!” she said to Fido. She reached for her clutch and grabbed a tissue, and then daubed her eyes and cleared her throat.

Me, I was about to tell this woman that Fido tries this chestnut on all the girls. He tries it because it works for him. She reached into her clutch again and brought out a small biscuit and gave it to Fido.

Not a quarter of an hour went by and the same thing happened, with only slight variations and a different woman, except she was even prettier than the first one.

Fido wanted to tell this one about yet another Mammoth guy sitting out on his porch with a dog.
“‘Does your dog bite?’ the stranger wanted to know.

“‘Nope,’ says the man with the dog.

“So the stranger reaches down to pet that dog, and the dog took just about a pound of flesh off his arm.
“‘Hey, I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!’”

“‘Well sir,’ says the man, ‘that’s not my dog.’”

Fido’s got a million of these kinds of stories. Actually, he has just three or four, but he uses them a million times.

“That last one really doesn’t work for me as well as the first one,” I said.